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Update: The Wikimedia Foundation’s most recent sustainability assessment from 2019 was published on 13 August, 2020. Learn more here. We at the Wikimedia Foundation strive to ensure that our work and mission support a sustainable world. Today, we are releasing a sustainability assessment that chronicles the total carbon footprint of the Foundation’s work and commits….

The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to announce the appointment of Grant Ingersoll as Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Grant brings two decades of experience in open source software development and natural language processing engineering to the Foundation. He will join the Foundation on 23 September. The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and….

The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to announce $2.5 million in support from Craig Newmark Philanthropies that will help to ensure the security of Wikipedia, as well as the organization’s other sites and global community of volunteers. At a time of increased cybersecurity threats, this philanthropic investment from the organization of craigslist founder Craig Newmark will….

A galloping overview As we have done before, let’s get a bird’s-eye view of the parts of the search process: text comes in and gets processed and stored in a database (called an index); a user submits a query; documents that match the query are retrieved from the index, ranked based on how well they….

Earlier this year, the European Parliament voted to pass a new copyright directive that will take effect across the European Union (EU) and likely affect all online activities. At Wikimedia’s 18 July summer legal fellow panel, “EU Copyright & You,” technology law scholars and practitioners discussed the directive itself, events leading up to its passing, and….

Last February, the European Commission defined (pdf) two Creative Commons (CC) licenses as the default for most of what it publishes: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (“CC BY 4.0”) for all content. Commons Universal Public Domain Dedication deed (“CC0”) for raw data, metadata or other documents of comparable nature.   The European Commission’s….

The Smithsonian—one of the leading museums and research centers in the United States—has added over 200 images of women involved in the battle for women’s suffrage in the country to Wikimedia Commons, one of the world’s largest collections of freely licensed media. The donation helps advance the Smithsonian’s strategic plan, which calls for reaching one….

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation welcomes the news that our case brought before  the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to lift the block of Wikipedia in Turkey has been communicated to the Turkish Government and given priority status by the court, just two months after the case was filed with the court. Priority status is….

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has decided to expedite a case brought by the Wikimedia Foundation against the government of Turkey for blocking Wikipedia in the country. The case contends that the longstanding ban amounts to impermissible censorship and limits peoples’ fundamental rights to free expression and access to knowledge. The ban was….

Avrupa İnsan Hakları Mahkemesi (AİHM), Wikimedia Vakfı’nın ülkedeki Vikipedi’ye erişim engelinden ötürü Türk hükûmetine karşı açtığı bir davayı hızlandırmaya karar verdi. Davada, uzun zamandır devam eden yasağın kabul edilemez bir sansür boyutuna ulaştığı ve insanların ifade özgürlüğü ve bilgiye erişim temel haklarının sınırlandığı ileri sürülmekte. Erişim engeli Türk hükümeti tarafından Nisan 2017’de yürürlüğe kondu. Vikipedi’yi….